Tax is an optional Google Merchant Center attribute, submitted as <g:tax> in XML feeds, that explicitly tells Google how much sales tax to add on top of the price attribute for a given item, rather than relying on Google's default account-level tax settings. It's built specifically for US merchants, since most other countries require tax-inclusive pricing to already be baked directly into the price field instead.

Why It Matters

When tax is left unset in a US feed and the account-level tax settings in Merchant Center don't match what's actually charged at checkout, shoppers see one price in the ad and a different total at payment, which is exactly the kind of mismatch that triggers price-accuracy suspensions. Getting tax right matters most for merchants selling across multiple US states with different rates, or shipping physical goods where tax also applies to shipping charges and needs to be flagged accordingly. Because tax sits between the advertised price and what actually lands in the merchant's account, it's also a required input for anyone calculating true net profit per order rather than gross revenue per click.

How It Works

The tax attribute uses a colon-delimited format: country:region:rate:tax_ship, for example US:CA:8.25:y, where the region is a two-letter US state code, the rate is a percentage, and tax_ship indicates with y or n whether the rate also applies to the shipping attribute. Google only honors tax for feeds targeting the United States; for every other supported country, the displayed price must already include applicable VAT or GST, and the tax attribute is ignored if submitted. Google also allows tax rules to be set at the account level in Merchant Center as a fallback, but a value submitted directly in the feed takes precedence for that item. Meta Catalog has no direct equivalent to Google's granular tax attribute -- Meta expects the price field to already reflect what the customer pays, so merchants running both channels typically compute tax upstream in their PIM and only push the separated tax attribute into the Google-bound feed. This split is one of several channel-specific quirks worth auditing during a broader feed audit process, alongside how shipping charges get taxed in states that require it.

Example

<item>
  <g:id>SKU-51902</g:id>
  <title>Ceramic Dutch Oven - 5.5qt</title>
  <link>https://example-shop.com/products/dutch-oven-55qt</link>
  <g:price>89.00 USD</g:price>
  <g:tax>
    <g:country>US</g:country>
    <g:region>CA</g:region>
    <g:rate>8.25</g:rate>
    <g:tax_ship>y</g:tax_ship>
  </g:tax>
</item>

Related Concepts

Tax only matters in the context of price, since it's the amount added on top of that base figure, and it frequently gets bundled with shipping when a state also taxes delivery charges. For finance-minded feed operators, tax is one of the deductions that separates a feed's advertised price from the net profit a sale actually generates, alongside cost of goods and payment processing fees.